The present invention relates to a communications device, particularly but not exclusively, to devices such as selective call receivers for example radio pagers, cellular or cordless telephones or corded telephones.
Such communications devices incorporate one or more alerting transducers which may be audible, visual or tactile. In the case of a radio pager, which can be less intrusive than cellular or cordless telephones, when a user has been alerted, he/she has no indication about the source or the perceived priority of a message. The only way of ascertaining this information is for the user to read the message which has been received.
Battery powered communications devices generally have LCD displays for displaying control and user interface data as well as messages. As is known LCD displays have a poor contrast which can make them difficult to read under poor lighting conditions, especially for visually impaired users.
Typically communications devices generate audible alerts such as sequences of tones and more recently melodies. In earlier devices such audible alerts were preprogrammed by the manufacturer which meant users of similar devices in a small working area may be confused as to whose device is generating an alert. More recently a range of different melodies have been pre-programmed into a communications device and a user manually selects one of the melodies in the range during the setting-up of the device""s user interface.
WO 92/03891 discloses a selective call receiver in which a user can manually program his/her own melody note by note into the receiver. An LCD panel in the receiver displays the melody as it is being created. The creation of the melody may be done using 2 keys provided on the receiver or by an external programming computer. A problem with this approach is that entering melody data may be tedious, slow and error prone, especially for a visually impaired person, and is costly in terms of perceived product quality.
An object of the present invention is to facilitate the generation of a distinctive audible alerting signal in a communications device.
According to one aspect of the present invention there is provided a point-to-point communications device comprising receiving means for receiving a message, control means for determining if a received message is destined for the communications device and alerting means for producing an alerting signal, the alerting signal being determined from the received message.
According to another aspect of the present invention there is provided a method of generating a melody in a point-to-point communications device, comprising receiving and decoding a message, and generating a melody using decoded message data.